


Coming home early is always a mistake

by dimtraces



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Magic, The Lawless AU, Zombies, sort of Major Character Death anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 05:19:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10550734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: A week after the Outsider’s control of Mandalore suddenly collapses, Bo-Katan Kryze enters the palace to investigate.(The Lawless AU)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Go to the Endnotes for warnings. They contain spoilers.

Bo-Katan gets the first notion that something is wrong when she stumbles over a small cuboid in the dark of the corridor. _(No, that’s not right: Things have been wrong for days now, ugly inhuman screams echoing out of the Sundari palace halls at random intervals. Out of the_ home _she’s been chased from, the home none of her people have dared enter since that monster took it. The home where her sister was murdered in cold blood. Breaking the pacifist’s hold on Mandalore was never supposed to be like this! Things have been wrong for months.)_

The object skitters away with a metallic screech.

She jiggles a button on the bottom of her helmet, switching night-vision for infra-red heat vision turned up to maximum in case she’s missed something before, and looks around again. She sniffs. No, still just rotten meat. She should really invest in an air-filter for her helmet. She strains her ears for any sign of danger— _never forget, you’re in enemy territory now, it’s no longer your home. It hasn’t been for a long time now_.

Then, Bo-Katan kneels down to investigate. Her hands wrap around an angular handle, a square crossguard. She holds it away from her and thumbs the ‘saber on, and she sees nothing: A blade-shaped spot of nothing in the faint hint of green-lit darkness that is this corridor.

She’s picked up the Darksaber.

The Outsider must have left it behind when he disappeared.

_How dare he._

This is what he murdered Pre Viszla for, after all; the palace is why he killed Satine. _She’s going to force-feed him his own char-boiled liver when she finds him._

He took everything, and then he dropped it like trash.

If only the Death Watch had listened to her objections. If only they had spaced Maul and his pathetic brother the second they’d picked them—

There’s something alive in here!

Bo-Katan narrows her eyes. Scrutinises the visor again. She’s looked up in her fury, and there it is, a bright spot of heat somewhere in front of her. An alcove in the ceiling if she’s correct about her exact location, and she is: She’s played hide-and-seek in the palace often enough as a child, preparation for the day when they might have to defend it from the inside. _Little did they know that Pre Viszla himself would just invite the monster into their home._

She switches back to night vision, exact location of the heat-spot memorized. She turns on the Darksaber again and holds it in front of her, braced for a fight, and then she uses her jetpack to hover up to the hiding-place.

Wedged into the alcove sits the curled-up corpse of the Outsider.

No, not corpse.

(Not _yet._ )

Maul doesn’t react to Bo-Katan’s appearance at all—his eyes are closed, in fact, as if he was meditating—but she can still see him breathing faintly, even though he also looks burned to a crisp and uncannily emaciated. _He didn’t look this bad when they pulled him out of the escape pod!_ He’s glowing faintly, too, and in the same greenish color that her night-vision sensors told her was in the corridor.

Concentrating, she can see two long strands of barely-there light trail down to the floor.

That’s why she doesn’t react quickly, she’ll tell herself later. The appearance of her worst enemy and that ghostly light threw her off, when she should have just skewered the Outsider on the blade he’d once stolen and lost and never deserved.

As it is, when Bo-Katan finally decides to stab Maul, it’s too late.

A massive hand wraps around her ankle and throws her head-first into the wall.

She recovers quickly— _not quickly enough, her training tells her, a second strike should have hit her and she should be dead_ —and scrambles to her feet. She’s still clutching the Darksaber, she notes in relief.

Through the ringing in her ears, she thinks she can hear something mumble, the smacking of lips.

She looks up.

The skin on the Outsider’s brother’s face is bloated, lightly sagging at one eye. Purplish spots break up his yellow skin. She’s found the source of the rotting smell, it seems—Bo-Katan has spent enough years on a battlefield to know what a recently-dead body looks like.

His eyes are surprisingly lucid though, focused and following her face, and the mouth! His incisors are bared, discoloured lips pulled up in a snarl, and Savage Opress’ mouth jerks, trying to force out words through the blockade of his swollen tongue. He only manages a glob of blood-flecked spittle.

_Trust those Outsiders to not even die right!_

She doesn’t waste any time.

The Darksaber tears through Savage’s blotchy flesh-arm, shearing it off at the biceps, and he shuffles back.

He opens his mouth again, “Sho… Ree… Pleashhh…”

Then, with stiff and unsure movements, he kneels down. He’s much shorter than she remembers him being.

Bo-Katan raises her weapon. She’ll just behead him now, and then turn her sister’s murderer into minced meat while he’s still unconscious. _(She imagines Satine saying, “No. We must try for a peaceful solution,” and laughs bitterly. That’s what you get for being a pacifist.)_

Between them, the green light grows stronger.

It engulfs the dismembered arm.

She lowers her ‘saber again, shock-still for the second time in mere minutes— _she’s been trained better than this!_

The arm moves, slowly at first and dragging on the floor, and then the light lifts it up against Savage’s shoulder. Shrapnel from the corridor wraps around the gap _(durasteel parts from the palace’s burst stained-glass windows, Bo-Katan thinks distantly)_ and when Savage stands up again, the ragged metal ring is the only sign she attacked him at all.

That’s what Maul’s light-strands do too, she realizes. This is where they lead.

There’s a hole in Savage’s chest, burnt straight through, where she’s fairly sure one of his hearts should be. Another hole next to it, plugged up with shredded lumps of metal that wriggle like maggots when Savage moves. The light-strands pulse into the ragged holes in his chest.

Those burnt wounds… Someone stabbed Savage with a ‘saber blade. _Strange._ Despite everything, Bo-Katan never got the impression that Maul would murder his _own_ brother—he seemed protective, even, when he woke up after the rescue. But that’s what must have happened. What other lightsaber-wielder is there on Mandalore?

_But why keep Savage alive, now?_

_(And how?)_

Unless…

“Pleash… Heee… Heelll…” Savage mumbles, and he still doesn’t try to attack.

The Outsider’s control of Mandalore was broken a ten-day ago. Nobody Bo-Katan has talked to knew what happened. No-one was there. No-one who was there _survived_. And yet, they all saw the lightning come from inside the throne room, and heard the screams. She even sought out those in the Death Watch still loyal to the Outsider when the silence in her childhood home grew too much—when she wanted to know if she’s missed her chance to kill him—and nobody had heard anything from Maul. The excursion teams that went in before her all reported the same thing, when they hurried out of the palace: Dead Mandos, quickly brought out and buried, and no trace of either zabrak brother.

Only signs of struggle in the throne room and all over the palace, and that green light, and after a few days, that smell.

“Go… Tsheak… Maul, pleashhh…” Savage Opress manages to slur out. “Sheaaav…”

Bo-Katan’s eyes jerk over to Maul. _Take him?_ He can’t be serious. He can’t think— _she came into the palace expressly to kill them, if she found a scrap of them alive!_

“The monsshh… ter. He’shhh here… coming… back…”

Savage raises his trembling, recently-dismembered arm, and points behind her.

Bo-Katan whirls around.

There’s an old man in a deep red robe standing at the end of the corridor. His hands are clasped demurely before him.

“Ah, there you are,” he says.

And then, he grins.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: So the premise of this thing is that Maul completely cracks when Savage dies and uses Dathomiri magic to keep him alive. Only he doesn't really know what he's doing, and the injuries were too severe, so what he actually does is, he keeps Savage's consciousness in his slowly rotting corpse. Hence, some descriptions of rotting corpses, but I don't think it's too gross. ~~I tried, okay, but this is hard.~~ Sidious finds it amusing, and only occasionally hunts them down for more torture.
> 
> Originally this was going to feature Obi-Wan, but then I remembered I like Bo-Katan, and also that I'd have to write him angsting about the woman who was fridged to fuel his manpain. So here's Bo-Katan, only her angst is less angst and more "Die!!!"
> 
>  
> 
> ~~And afterwards she runs away and is grimly content that even if Maul murdered her sister, at least he suffered.~~
> 
>  
> 
> I was going to call this "I almost believed that the sight of the hole in your skull was a thing that my heart could endure" (that line from the Mountain Goats song) but then I sadly decided it was too long.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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